And now Europe will look grey and brown

Europe is thrilled by the prospect of an Obama victory at the polls : all surveys show that more than 70% of European citizens would vote for the Democratic contender against his Republican challenger. However an Obama presidency will be a major challenge for Europe. Suddenly in a few hours the image of the U.S. will change and Europe with its neo-nazis in Vienna, its trash TV king in Rome and its ultra-conservative dinosaurs in Warsaw will look old and passé, grey and brown.

Obama has indeed the capacity to radically increase the soft power of his country because he has been able to articulate the hopes of hundreds of millions of people around a message of reason and compassion.
Compared to Obama’s audacity of hope the European Union will have to show that it is as inspiring as the new White House resident. A tough assignment, a losing proposition, if one looks at the current European political panorama.
The onus will fall in particular on the European liberals and progressives. However as bad as the European neopopulists can be these liberal forces have been mostly unable to develop a convincing response to the economic and financial crisis rocking the world. The French socialists are fighting each other, Dominique Strauss-Kahn gets in the news for his private affairs more than for his bold proposals, Belgian socialists are mostly silent, German social-democrats seem to be clueless between Angela Merkel and Die Linke, etc etc.
The two European leaders that seem most reactive to the crisis, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, belong to conservative parties.
The more (mildly) progressive winds seem to blow from the West to the East over the Atlantic. Obama, despite his cautious centrism, is a radical departure from the dark days of the Bush administration and definitely a progress on the road to decency. Quite a few surveys conclude that the younger U.S. generation is more open and more liberal than their elders. Compare that with the 40% of Austrian youth (the future past for Hitler’s youth?) voting for extreme right parties.
Europe seems adrift and its liberal voices are smothered by rising populism. By giving the Nobel Economics Prize to the U.S. columnist and professor Paul Krugman the Stockholm jury has apparently recognized this pitiful state of affairs: it seems to trust more a U.S. liberal thinker to defend the European social-democratic model than a European social democrat.

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Paul Krugman: his Nobel Prize is an indictment of Bush and McCain's casino economics

Everyone expected a strong political message from Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize and we got a honest and rather uncontroversial Finnish peace broker as a laureate.
Politics however seems to be the name of the game for the selection of the Nobel Prize for Economics. And politics is definitely not a dirty word. By choosing Paul Krugman, the leading basher of neoconservatism and of Bushist economics the Stockholm jurors have sent a very strong signal to the U.S….and to the rest of the world.
A professor at the prestigious Princeton University Paul Krugman is a respected economist in academic circles but he is also one of the most active opinion leaders in "liberal America".
“Liberalism” is back in fashion across the Atlantic, not only because two Bush administrations have exhausted the conservative capital by linking it to violations of the Constitution and of basic tenets of international law, but also because Paul Krugman had been warning everyone about the impending financial crash and the crass anti-social economic policies of the Republican Party.
If Obama wins the presidency this is the kind of committed intellectual that should be put at the top of a key economic committee in order to guide the U.S. back to sanity and decency.
Paul Krugman could also provide disoriented European social-democrats with real guidance, away from the rust belt of the past and from the fake Blairist and Third Way modernism.
It is time to read The Conscience of a Liberal, reminding everyone in Europe that the epithet “liberal” in the US designates progressives, concerned with the common good and are the antithesis to Europeans libéraux.
The final words of the introduction to this book is crystal clear: "What should the new (Democratic) majority do? My answer is that it should, for the nation’s sake, pursue an unabashedly liberal program of expanding the social safety net and reducing inequality – a new New Deal”.
With people like this a new transatlantic progressive link really makes sense.

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A leading Spanish pundit, Gustavo Palomares, bets on Obama and finds Palin scary

“A Barack Obama victory would be better for Europe. Sarah Palin is a worrying prospect”. These two judgments have been expressed by one of the leading foreign affairs commentators in Spain. In a TV interview broadcast on Safe Democracy website (www.safe-democracy.org), Professor Gustavo Palomares, who teaches at the Diplomatic School of the Spanish Foreign Ministry and is a frequent contributor of El Pais, has not only predicted that Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States, but also ,that he would bring “fresh air” in the international arena.

“He would be good news for America’s European allies, and for all the processes in which the U.S. has a role to play: the Middle East, Latin American integration, etc”, he said. Underlining that Obama would bring diplomatic “finesse” and downgrade the use of force Mr. Palomares has not hidden his anguish at the prospect of a Sarah Palin’s presidency. “Her conservatism and her inexperience make that possibility a very worrying proposition”.
Coming from a respected member of the Spanish and European (and Americanophile) Establishment this opinion demonstrates once more that John McCain made a terrible choice out of electoral opportunism and dropped his ambition to be seen as more responsible and more “presidential” than his Democratic rival.

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